News from the antiwar, anti-austerity, self-determination struggle in Ukraine

​By Roger Annis, August 8, 2015

This is an occasional reminder notification to readers of A Socialist In Canada about the website which I help to edit and publish: The New Cold War: Ukraine and beyond. Enclosed for your information are four items recently published there.

1. Canadian political leaders’ non-debate over UkraineThis is an editorial dated August 7 reviewing the first televised debate between the leaders of Canada’s political parties in Parliament as concerns Ukraine. The debate took place on August 6. Canada will have a national election on October 19. The election campaign is extraordinarily long, for Canada. The governing Conservative Party chose a longer campaign because it has the largest financial resources of all the parties and therefore can purchase more advertising time in mass media, the better to sway the final result. The headline of the editorial explains the gist of the debate on Ukraine, such as it was (not).

2. Canadian journalist writes from Ukraine praising extreme-right paramilitaries
This article by myself reports on a particularly egregious example of a mainstream journalist in Canada promoting the extreme-right in Ukraine. Diane Francis is not the first Canadian journalist to do so. But she is probably the most well known, and definitely the most aggressive. (In passing, I am pleased to report that the Toronto Star and Globe and Mail are no longer publishing articles praising the extreme-right in Ukraine. A string of such articles appeared in late 2014 and early 2015.)

3. A letter to Mama, who died from the shellingThis letter, written recently by a 13-year old girl in eastern Ukraine, will, I trust, become enshrined as one of the great antiwar declarations of our times. The letter is written to her mother, who died in a shelling attack by the Ukrainian army several months ago.

4. Feature interview from Donetsk with Ukrainian pianist Valentina Lisitsa
And here is a remarkable interview with the Ukrainian classical pianist superstar Valentina Lisitsa. The interview was given on June 22, just hours before she performed an outdoor concert in Donetsk. The concert was in commemoration of the awful anniversary of the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany in 1941.

Watch for a forthcoming article by myself on the innovative efforts by the Ukrainian population to oppose the civil war policies and course (so-called ‘anti-terrorist operation’) of the extremist, neo-conservative government in power in Kyiv.

You can subscribe to receive the daily e-mail notice of items posted to the New Cold War.org website. Just go to the website front page and click on the invitation to do so.

Roger Annis is a longtime socialist and trade union activist. He began his political activism with the Young Socialists of the day in Nova Scotia while at university. Since then, he has lived in most regions of Canada, including in Montreal where he became fluent in French. He is a retired aerospace worker living in Vancouver. Roger writes regularly on topics of social justice and peace.